A Killer's Guide to Good Works by Shelley Costa

Author:Shelley Costa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: amateur sleuth books, british cozy mysteries, cozy mystery, contemporary women, women sleuths, womens fiction
Publisher: Henery Press Publishing
Published: 2016-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

19

New York

By the end of the day, when Val emerged from the Flatiron Building with a sigh that may have fractured a rib or two, the wind had picked up and what clouds she could see over Broadway were gathering, blotted by the sky into one general overcast. Even though she had switched out of her heels and slipped on a pair of sensible Keens, she teetered as she set off uptown in one of her rare spurts of exercise. Bad day to decide to hoof it home. Bale had left a cryptic voicemail message that he was beginning to think it was all his fault. He had just gotten back to the city—call him—he’ll fill her in. There was the wryness in his voice that was coming to sound familiar to her, but there were so many pauses in that simple message that the only thing that could explain it, to her mind, was pain. How could Adrian’s murder, and possibly the boy Fintan’s, in any way be Bale’s fault?

She shouldered her way through the crowd crossing Madison Avenue as she headed east to Lexington. Then there was the meeting with Killian. A book on scandals in the craft beer biz. He held out the promise of murder, intrigue, industrial espionage, and deep deceit. As he sat there across from her in his tight jeans and stone-washed denim shirt, he sipped something mysterious in a Starbucks cup and agreed to her terms: a two-page overview, table of contents, plus two sample chapters. By agreeing, what he gave her was a slow nod. Whether he thought she was being utterly reasonable or a complete piece of editorial shit, she had no way of knowing—but that was typical of her time in Killian’s company.

He had the scrappy look of a Hollywood action hero. Harrison Ford with a crooked tooth. Bruce Willis who took maybe one too many fights out the back, for real. He looked so damned artless she suspected what she was looking at was really the highest form of artfulness and that she, Val Cameron, full-time editor and sometime sap, was just another conquest. On the bright side, a conquest very far down the hall from any bed. And then, as she had a flash of an image of his short, shaggy dark blond hair touching all the tenderest parts of her, she wondered if that was indeed the bright side.

The guy unsettled her. So she circled the wagons.

And he knew it. So she stacked the circled wagons row upon row and shot him a look over her own Starbucks cup—what could be less mysterious than an Americano?—that dared him to leap. When he licked some foam off his lips—she liked to think it was from a cappuccino and not something either inherent to Killian or just a product of the fuggy air in her closed office—she neatened up a stack of bookmarks that were already perfectly stacked.

“You interest me, Cameron,” he had said softly, his dark gray eyes running their own itinerary across her face and shoulders, looking, it struck her, for soft spots.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.